ABSTRACT
Jerome offers his reading of Origen’s suggestions concerning the bestial potential of the soul as proof of Origen’s belief in “Pythagorean metempsychosis”. Nature was a process of making, growing, arising, unfolding, and it was identified variously with cosmic sympathy, providence, soul, and God. For the wisdom of nature consists in a journey through the visible aspects of “each single thing” to “certain secret metaphors”. Like John, Origen was able to see the beasts as sportive monsters of the soul. In his aesthetic vision, the “partridge playing in the dust” is an interior figure; it is a way of sensing, and making sense of, an inner world. One of Origen’s most pointed statements about aesthetic soul-work comes in his Commentary on the Song of Songs. That soul’s inhabitants are phantasmal creatures is clear in Origen’s discussion of the psychological dimensions of free will, again in De principiis.
